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Book Review
Feb. 8th, 2025 03:53 pmAll Passion Spent
by Vita Sackville-West
This novel concerns the final year of Deborah Holland, Lady Slane. Now a widow after decades as the wife of a high-profile politician and diplomat and raising six children, she decides to finally live life on her own terms. She rejects her childrens' offers to have her live with them, rents a small house in the country, and hangs out with an assortment of other elderly folk.
This is a fairly quiet novel, mostly concerned with Lady Slane's reflections on her life and her insistence on being left to her own devices. Her children are for the most part pompous and officious, convinced that their mother is frail and flighty. Lady Slane herself is an interesting woman who mastered being the ideal politician's wife, but always kept a private self at her core. She has, of course, lived a rich life of comfort and privilege, and I think her dissastisfaction despite all of that is part of the point. Sackville-West is examining the ways societal conventions and roles for women erase their own identities and ambitions, and I think making her main character someone whose erasure brought along with it significant benefits helps to highlight how terrible that erasure is, that it cannot be compensated for with wealth and status.
by Vita Sackville-West
This novel concerns the final year of Deborah Holland, Lady Slane. Now a widow after decades as the wife of a high-profile politician and diplomat and raising six children, she decides to finally live life on her own terms. She rejects her childrens' offers to have her live with them, rents a small house in the country, and hangs out with an assortment of other elderly folk.
This is a fairly quiet novel, mostly concerned with Lady Slane's reflections on her life and her insistence on being left to her own devices. Her children are for the most part pompous and officious, convinced that their mother is frail and flighty. Lady Slane herself is an interesting woman who mastered being the ideal politician's wife, but always kept a private self at her core. She has, of course, lived a rich life of comfort and privilege, and I think her dissastisfaction despite all of that is part of the point. Sackville-West is examining the ways societal conventions and roles for women erase their own identities and ambitions, and I think making her main character someone whose erasure brought along with it significant benefits helps to highlight how terrible that erasure is, that it cannot be compensated for with wealth and status.
